The future of UC : WebRTC vs UC-RTC-Web vs UCWA

It is clear that the web based communication will gain traction as opposed to traditional communications as more and more devices like tablets and smartphones are connected to internet and bandwidth is no longer an issue even on mobile data networks. Browser based communications, Skype on all possible platforms, Skype integration into Facebook, Lync federation between Lync, Public IM Networks, including Skype and so on you can only imagine where all of this will end up in the end.

Many initiatives are taken by various groups to get in browser communication up and running using protocols already being used in web development and optimized for web based internet communications. HTML5, Javascript and REST API’s are at the base of these innovation, hiding the complexity of the communications layers which are baked into the Web Communication API’s layers.

Here is a list of web based communications implementations:

WebRTC: W3C Current Draft. WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose.

UC-RTC-Web: Microsoft Proposal for Open Standard. This specification describes a proposal to bring real-time communications capabilities to web browsers. It addresses four critical requirements: it is designed to honor the key tenets of the web architecture, it supports a customizable response to changing network quality, ubiquitous deployability on existing network infrastructure, and flexibility in supporting popular media formats and codecs, as well as openness to future innovation.

A great article by Microsoft explaining what they actually want to achieve and make it super easy for developers to integrate and customize Communications into application without even having to know the ins and outs of SIP and SDP which is very specific to Real Time Communications in VOIP networks and more importantly are not very well know by developers, especially web developers.